iPad Resales Surge Over 700%

By Quentin Fottrell

As soon as Apple unveiled the iPad mini Tuesday, the first thing many consumers did was sell their old iPads.

Two major resale sites reported eye-popping surges in business in the run-up to the iPad Mini launch. Some 140,000 devices were put up for sale on Gazelle.com Tuesday – a 700% spike from the day before, says Anthony Scarsella, chief gadget officer at the site. Half of that increase occurred in the hours just before the announcement, he says – and the most common model put up for sale was the “new iPad” released just six months ago. Another resale site, NextWorth.com, reported that trade-ins for iPads rose over 1,000% on Tuesday. (Nextworth declined to release actual numbers.) Gazelle and Nextworth are two of the biggest reselling portals, but industry experts say they represent only a small percentage of total trade-in traffic.

The $329 iPad Mini, which will hit shelves on November 2 in time for the holiday shopping season, is primarily aimed at competition from smaller, less expensive tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Google’s Nexus 7, both of which cost $199. But, given the price difference between the mini and other 7-inch tablets and the spate of iPad trade-ins over the last 24 hours, experts say the 7.9-inch Mini’s biggest competitor may be the larger 9.7-inch iPad.

While some people are trading in first and second generation iPads, both Nextworth and Gazelle say that nearly 70% of their resellers are dumping the iPad 3. In fact, the third generation iPad 32-gigabyte with Wi-Fi is the most popular device being traded in, according to Gazelle.com. Why? “Consumers can fetch up to $495 for an old iPad,” Scarsella says. In other words, they can swap the used tablet for the mini and walk away with over $160.

Of course, some diehard fans could also be upgrading to the fourth-generation iPad because it has a processor with twice the speed, says e-commerce consultant Bryan Eisenberg. But others say that’s less likely given that it’s coming out just seven months after the third-generation model was announced. And as MarketWatch reported, 35% of iPad owners surveyed by deal aggregator TechBargains.com say they’d trade in their old model for a mini. The shrunken tablet is over 50% lighter than the iPad, Apple says, and nearly a quarter thinner.